The other day I ran into an old Consulting mentor of mine. Smooth, superior and self-assured, the man was Consulting Personified. But now gone were the suit and smirk, replace by sneakers, stubble and a sullen look. Could it be The Curse of the Consultant?

In my recent story on the Apple iSlate speculation, I pointed to Windows tablets to make the point that Steve Jobs and company don't invent things, they perfect them. But when I wrote that Apple doesn't have any tablet patents, a reader noted that what Apple does have is multi-touch interface patents. And those will be the key to the Apple tablet.

Monty Widenius continues his campaign to save MySQL from falling into Oracle's possession with a script that would have been suitable, perhaps, for the Perils of Pauline. The whole problem with "saving" MySQL at this point is that its most outspoken defenders chose to sell it to Sun, a firm on the brink of collapse.

This time of year, we pundit types like to post our summations of the past year's developments, our Best Of lists recapping our own work, and our industry predictions for next year, for 2010. Not me, not this year. I will, however, post on the year ahead... for me, on BI and analytics topics that I plan to cover in the next few months...

The operating-system buzz in 2009 may have been split 60/40 between Windows 7 and Google Chrome OS, but only the former is here today. As to whether a Web-centric OS like Chrome can ultimately edge out the most polished traditional desktop version ever, that's yet to be determined. During 2010, though, I expect that Windows 7 will increase its footprint, as enterprises initially wary of adoption begin to fold Win7 boxes into heterogeneous environments.

AT&T has resumed sales if the iPhone in New York city via their website. I tested a few zip codes in the area and both the 3G and 3GS models are available, as well as refurbished phones. For whatever reason AT&T pulled them over the weekend from the website, they have apparently reversed course.

Much has been recorded about the rise of Salesforce.com and how Marc Benioff's clever marketing brought the company to the forefront. Today, with its stock reaching new highs, I wanted to pay tribute to a giant of cloud computing, Parker Harris, the technology magician behind the marketing who made Benioff's story possible.

According to the BBC, the first mobile phone version of Firefox is only "days away" from release. In reality, however, most mobile users at small and midsize companies will be in for a much longer wait.

Earlier this month, Oracle put out a press release promising to play nicely with MySQL if its Sun takeover is approved... Point #2 is the biggie, lifting a major cloud from the MySQL storage engine business.

If it's about information management, business intelligence, enterprise applications, processes or architecture, it's listed in our annual guide to technology events. Make your plans for the can't-miss conferences, expos and summits of 2010.

In 2010 cloud storage will continue to grow in use but like my other 2010entries, next year won't be the "year" of cloud storage. As we discussed in our article "What is Cloud Storage", people and organization

For processor-architecture voyeurs of the Intel variety, 2009 was most interesting for the emergence of the low end as market segment with legs enough to compete with traditional laptops. (Read: Atom and netbooks.) At the same time, servers got a big kicker with release of the Nehalem line in April.

With the proliferation of enterprise content management (ECM) vendors at many organizations, a new challenge is developing around managing federated ECM systems. Can the content management applications within an organization be integrated to help users find the information they need?

AT&T has halted online sales of the iPhone in New York City. You can verify this by going to AT&T's online site and entering a NYC zip code. Sure enough, I entered a Brooklyn zip code and the iPhone was missing. When I changed it to my southern California zip, the iPhone 3GS and 3G showed up in the list. What is going on?

Apple's expected release of a humongous-screened iPod will legitimize the platform for business users. It could, in turn, revive Windows-based tablets and make Webpads the big alt.platform story of 2010.

As 2010 approaches, Windows 7 seems to be experiencing a successful launch and warm reception from both businesses and consumers. I've just switched over to Windows 7 for my day-to-day desktop, and definitely think it's an improvement over both XP and Vista. That's fortunate, because I suspect we'll all be using Windows 7 for most of the next decade.

A good number of kids will go to bed tonight thinking at least two things about the traditions of Christmas: first, they'll consciously be thankful and thrilled about their presents and, unconsciously, they'll have been further indoctrinated into the miracles of technology.

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.